Land of Hypocrites

An excellent article by Shandana Minhas, who I am tempted to email to congratulate on having written something so excellent. I am pleasantly surprised that Dawn published it, given its acknowledgment of atheists and agnostic as minorities; nay, as existing! This is the first positive reference to atheists and agnostics I have seen in the Pakistani press, and I am very proud of Ms. Minhas for having the courage to make it.

“Quite apart from the fact that whether a Muslim fasts is not the business of the state, the ordinance effectively marginalizes Pakistan’s minorities, among which should be included its atheists, its agnostics, its dissolutes, telling them that if they cannot conform, they will be made to conform. So, an affirmation of the lingering suspicion that minority’s rights will remain forever subservient to the majority’s misplaced perceptions of its own? One more nod to the mullah fostered ignorance, arrogance and insularity that has brought us nothing but fragmentation and death? What a way to mark the passage of the month meant to foster empathy and community for all humanity, not just one subset of it. And what a hypocritical lot some of us are, baying for the blood of one dictator while kowtowing to the pseudo-religious fascism that should have been buried with another. In an unmarked grave.”

Born believers: How your brain creates God

Here are the some extracts from the article ‘Born believers: How your brain creates God‘ by Michael Brooks which appeared in New Scientist:

‘The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes, religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human society.

The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn’t wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness….

An alternative being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works.